Tag: hurricanes

We watch. We witness. And what we see is an endless stream of behaviors which offend the senses, that certainly change America’s role in the world. We have hardly forgotten Trump’s treatment of Puerto Ricans when their nation was leveled by Hurricane Maria. He fought very publicly with the mayor of San Juan, he sneered at her and brought up Puerto Rico’s debts. His disdain for both women who refuse to be submissive and the people of Puerto Rico was on full display. He did not seem to know, or acknowledge once he did know, the close relationship between the US and Puerto Rico. He most likely has old evidence of Puerto Ricans he hired to work for him years ago stored in his moldy brain. So he threw paper towels to Puerto Ricans while he stroked his own ego. It was embarrassing, and if I had been one of the people who needed empathy and aide, disheartening.

Parts of Bermuda were recently leveled by Hurricane Dorian and I don’t recall any official statement of grief issuing forth from the US President at the terrible losses suffered there. Public conversation on American media instead revolved around a guy – our 45 – who hates to be wrong and so entered into a weeklong back-and-forth about his mistaken (oops, Trump is never mistaken) statement that Alabama was going to be in the path of the hurricane. Trump is shameless – he apparently added to the hurricane’s path with a “Sharpie”, extrapolating an extended path, and then excoriated a NOAA employee for disagreeing with the president’s bona fides as a meteorologist. NOAA admin then backed the president rather than their own employee because there is (frighteningly) only one expert in our government on every subject and that is the barely sane Donald Trump. I guess the weather was “fake” news.

From a Google Image Search – Trump defends visa rules – People.com

To add insult to injury, Trump’s new immigration stance, requiring that only folks with money and credentials (and white skin) need apply, made it difficult for those made homeless in Bahama, whose documents were destroyed by Dorian, to enter the US. Well Trump may not ever feel shame, but I did and I do. Do you recognize this incarnation of America? I don’t. Does the world recognize this as American behavior? They may cut America some slack for a while but probably not forever, because there are signs that protectionist, selfish behaviors are becoming the new normal, and many recognize that it never bodes well when the world goes there.

While we all have been engrossed by an approaching hurricane with all its unknown variables such as, where it will come ashore, what will the winds be like, and how much rain will fall, we have also been listening to our President play the Revising Recent History Game in what is just a typical week in Trump’s version of America.

Although we all watched the aftermath of two hurricanes slamming Puerto Rico, despite the fact that we all saw the footage of the devastation, Trump denies the most recent facts about how many died. Even though we decried the painfully botched recovery and we knew that the actual death toll had to be greater than the 16-17 deaths that were officially reported, our President, Donald Trump expects that we will deny our own senses, our own logical deductions, and allow him to insist that the scientific analysis that tells us the number of deaths was more like 3,000 is wrong.

No matter how you repackage the facts, Donald, Mr. 45, there are videos, there are witnesses. You could change every story printed on the matter, but you cannot erase what we saw with our own eyes. What we abhor the most is that you try to deny what is clearly a matter of record and that some Americans let you get away with it.

What will happen after this slow-moving Hurricane Florence finally blows itself out perhaps somewhere over the northern Atlantic? We’re on the mainland not an island (although that island was not very far away) so I expect the recovery will follow the usual pattern. FEMA will do its always somehow controversial thing. People from all over the US will pitch in to help. The convoys of utility trucks will wend their way backwards along the path of the hurricane. Some will bemoan the fact that they evacuated unnecessarily and will vow that next time they will stay put and a large swath of America will eventually be cleaned up and restored to something like pre-hurricane status. Deaths will be mourned and the living will go on.

Then we will try to figure out what to do about the newly exposed information that 12,800 immigrant children without parents are still being detained in the United States of America. Their parents have been found guilty of crimes and our government has decided not to place these children with foster families or with relatives already in America. What does our current administration have planned for these children?

This is the newest old plan according to the Daily Intelligencer, writing on September 13, 2018:

“In recent weeks President Trump has been threatening to shut down the government if Congress doesn’t give him more U.S. taxpayer money to build his border wall. In the meantime, his administration plans to take $20 million that Congress allocated for foreign assistance, and use it to pay Mexico for plane and bus fare to deport as many as 17,000 people in the country illegally.”

If you don’t like this source the same information appears in several other sources.

Our guts are already tangled by so many reports of weather gone slightly mad, of the inexplicable lies of America’s President to cover up his very odd behavior towards Puerto Rico, this new data about the numbers of immigrant children still being detained in America, and the hurried agenda of Mitch McConnell to pack the courts before the blue wave that could hopefully come in November (which we did not discuss but I will offer you a link)

Mitch McConnell plans to keep Senate open through October, against tradition to keep the confirmation-of-judges assembly line ticking along and to keep Dem Senators from going home to campaign.

If we were under attack from outer space or had contact with aliens would we band together? Or would we have factions of those who wanted to try diplomacy, and those who wanted to blow them out of the galaxy, and those who were in denial and kept claiming it was all a plot by those libtards to oust real Americans from power? Well the article claims that no aliens are involved in this mystery so we will not get to see if any of my alternative predictions pan out. But it does make us wonder what really is going on in New Mexico. And it will probably prove easier to resolve than any of the other big issues we consider each and every day in the administration of 45. Whew, which one of these crazy weeks will finally end either our democracy or this administration?